Friday, January 30, 2015

Alright, I have to get something off my chest. I hate when people say a movie is "so bad it's good." If you enjoyed a movie for any reason, then mission accomplished, you were entertained. And seriously, don't ever say to anybody "The ONLY way to see this film is on Mystery Science Theater 3000." It only makes you look bad that you can't watch a movie like "Eegah!" without someone spoon-feeding you what's amusing about it. A bad movie is no fun. Films with very low budgets and non-actors are entertaining if the story is interesting enough and those performers are game.

I had that feeling while watching "Shriek Of The Mutilated", which truly defies description in a lot of ways. I will talk about it here, but I could never really explain what it's like, you must seek out and view this film for yourself. And don't just watch it half-assed in a browser while you're doing something else, put it on your TV if at all possible, and allow yourself to get drawn into its bizarre artificial world.

Yeah man, it's the 70s, dig?

Cannibalism seems to be a theme lately on the blog--is it ever far from our minds?--so here's another fantastic people-eating movie that just may be one of the best movies in the universe. Previously it was lodged in the back of my mind because I must have read about it someplace as "that bigfoot movie where it's not really bigfoot" and I thought I had seen it for sure. When I started watching it though, I quickly realized I had never actually seen this movie at all. And I was stunned.

"Shriek Of The Mutilated" takes place in that alternate universe known as the early 1970s, in a dimension somewhere between a porno film, an early daytime TV soap opera, and a nightmare. Four college students named Keith, Karen, Tom and Lynn are listening to professor Ernst Prell lecture them about the Yeti, a mythological creature that Prell has devoted his life to studying and tracking. He intends to take the four to his associate Karl Werner's remote country estate on Boot Island, because Werner claims a Yeti has been lurking in the wilderness around his estate.

Yeti vision!

Dr. Prell takes Keith to dinner while Karen, Lynn and Tom attend a swingin' 70s college party. Almost as if on cue, former student Spencer St. Claire has an alcoholic breakdown after he discovers Prell is taking more students on a Yeti field trip. It seems Spencer also accompanied Dr. Prell seven years earlier, an episode that only he and Dr. Prell survived, and he stoically tells the room all about his experience, warning anybody who would dare go with Dr. Prell on his adventure. Meanwhile, Dr. Prell takes Keith to an exclusive restaurant where everyone gives each other a knowing look while they are eating a strange dinner called "gin sung". Although he doesn't name Spencer, Prell alludes to his unfortunate experience and tells Keith "I expect more from you." Yeah Spencer is a real nut case, and the first sign that "Shriek Of The Mutilated" is a work of sheer genius comes in a scene where Spencer and his wife return home from the party and spontaneously murder each other. She breaks his bottle of vodka, so he cuts her throat with an electric carving knife. But the onset of death turns her into a true ninja: when Spencer climbs into the bathtub (fully clothed) after attacking her, she drags her dying self into the bathroom along with a toaster, which she plugs into a handy socket and tosses into the bathtub with him.

Hey, no shrieking...you were NOT mutilated.

Despite the pathetically inebriated warnings Spencer gave before his untimely electrocution, the doomed college foursome go with Dr. Prell anyway to Dr. Werner's isolated estate, where Werner and his manservant Laughing Crow terrify them by talking in hushed tones about the Yeti that howls in the woods at night, and Dr. Werner himself swears he has had several near-encounters with it. Well, actually Dr. Werner does all the talking, Laughing Crow just glowers strangely at them and looks pissed off and confused at the same time. Maybe he's just annoyed that Werner refers to him as "his Indian."

"Listen, I forgot to tell you...don't say anything about the boots. OK?"

The Yeti has certain characteristics that they have been able to determine, most notably a strange offensive odor and a heartbeat that can be heard loudly wherever it goes. The characteristic you will notice right away about the Yeti is that it is clearly a human being wearing a costume that wouldn't frighten anything other than a children's birthday party. Eventually though, we learn that it looks like a costume because it really IS a costume: Prell and Werner have invented the Yeti because they are a part of a secret cult of cannibals who lure Prell's college students to their deaths so they can become dinner. The Yeti gives them a cover for the disappearances, and an excuse to isolate the kids before murdering them.

The fatally scratched faces of death.

The atmosphere in "Shriek of the Mutilated" can best be described as a horror kitsch cartoon come to life. In fact, it resembles a violent episode of "Scooby Doo" in a number of ways, including the fact that the Professor's van looks a hell of a lot like the Mystery Machine:

Okay?

Not only that, but look at these two and just try and not see Daphne and Velma:

I'm sure she just forgot to take them off before she got in bed.

And what episode of "Scooby Doo" didn't end with the monster being revealed as a man in a mask?

The visage of true terror, the beast itself confronts us!

But it isn't entirely kitschy. Although this movie is hopelessly dated and clearly not made by a film crew with a huge budget, "Shriek of the Mutilated" does have a strange effectiveness. It's quickly paced and never lets up, whether it's a horror sequence where the students are isolated and murdered, or one of the parts where the students shout histrionic lines of dialogue at one another. My favorite moment like this was the part where Keith and Karen allow Dr. Prell to convince them that, after both Tom and Lynn have been murdered by the "Yeti", the proper thing to do is to use pieces of Tom's body as bait to lure the Yeti into a trap. Karen finds herself the only person in the entire group who thinks the right thing to do is leave and find the police, and at one point she screams at Keith, "Stop treating me like a CHILD!" and he screams back at her "Well stop ACTING like one!" It's the line that should have been in "Mommie Dearest", but wasn't.

"What are you thinking, they told us to VIEW the scenery, not CHEW it."

The film's sets and sound design are gloriously cheap and alien. A swinging college party takes place in an apartment that doesn't look quite right, with strangely proportioned rooms and hanging lamps that one of the actors hits his head on as he walks down a hallway. The infamous double murder scene near the beginning of the film takes place in a claustrophobic apartment that could be part of either a dormitory or motel. The outdoor scenes at Dr. Prell's estate don't quite mesh with the large houses's interiors, which are best revealed in a set piece that is spellbinding in its strangeness: separated from Keith, Karen awakens from a dead faint to find herself alone in a room while the Yeti howls outside. She looks out the window and sees it running across the lawn toward the house. It then lunges at her through the window and drags itself inside, where it pursues her through the house in a dizzying chase.

The Yeti has a sound that follows it wherever it goes. The characters call it a "howl", but really what it sounds like is a person imitating a snarling Chihuahua while going "Num num num nummy yyyum yummmmm." There's also that ominous heartbeat, which is later revealed to be Laughing Crow playing drums into a loudspeaker system. It's staggering to ponder if the filmmakers wanted us to believe in the Yeti, too...although it is treated seriously early in the movie, the film's poster itself reveals that the Yeti is fake and the film's true villains are cannibals. And when you see somebody running quickly in a monster suit, nothing is more obvious than the fact that it's someone running in a monster suit. I wouldn't call it scary, but the giddy energy of these scenes is infectious.

Laughing Crow wants to axe you a question about cultural sensitivity.

And then that ending. Like I said before, the film's twist is revealed on the poster, but I suspect it was hoped during the filming and scripting that the audience would be shocked by it. The most shocking thing is that somehow the cheapness of everything that has come before it actually lends some loony credibility to the final act. After we find out the Yeti was fake all along, the fakeness we ourselves have witnessed actually makes sense, although there's no explaining the histrionic dialogue. Keith discovers that the Yeti is a ruse and escapes to get help, but Prell and Werner manage to scare Karen to death. The ritualistic aspect of what they've done apparently demands that the victim they intend to eat must not be bruised or physically harmed in any way, she must have died of fright. Keith brings back the police (apparently he could only find a single officer) and in the tradition of these movies, he is one of them, and Dr. Prell makes him the same offer that he apparently made to Spencer years ago: join them and eat human flesh (his own girlfriend), or be killed and eaten by all of them. The ambiguous ending has Keith salivating over the offering of eating Karen's flesh. Will Keith become a true cannibal, or end up like Spencer, only left alive to carry back the legend of the Yeti so more victims can be lured into the trap?

The gore effects are mostly of the "fake bloody limb" variety, and the Yeti mostly seems to kill its victims by scratching their faces to death, but the movie loves to show it over and over again. Lynn even gets a pound sign scratched into her face during her meet-the-Yeti moment, breaking the facial death wound mold of two or three parallel stripes. Although directed by notorious exploitation filmmaker Michael Findlay ("Snuff", "The Touch Of Her Flesh", and numerous early porn features), the movie doesn't really go too far over the top with the on-screen violence. Even the scene where Spencer supposedly cuts his wife's throat with a carving knife is bloody but not explicit.

The acting in the film is like an early John Waters film, with what appears to be a group of the filmmaker's friends portraying the characters. "Overacting" is putting it mildly. Indeed, for most of these actors, "Shriek of the Mutilated" is their only credit on IMDB. A few of them do appear in the same director's "Invasion of the Blood Farmers", and lead actress Jennifer Stock also appears in "Bloodsucking Freaks". She turns in one of those performances where she's supposed to be pushed to the limits of her endurance, like her best girlfriend Sally Hardesty, but unlike Sally Hardesty, she doesn't escape becoming a meal. Incidentally, although we know "gin sung" is a meal made from human flesh, it also appears to be an actual meal prepared by a presumably cannibal chef. When Karen's body is presented to the cult members to be consumed, it looks like they just wheeled her body out on a gurney and intended to eat it "tartare".

The SHOWER CURTAIN. OK? Just look at it.

How you like me now?

"Shriek of the Mutilated" is a rickety, lunatic ride that I urge you to take. If you have seen this and were hoping it would be a bigfoot movie, I feel for you, but you did get some bigfoot buttons pushed, right? Personally, I found one of the better horror sequences in the movie to be a well staged scene where the first student gets picked off by the Yeti when he foolishly wanders off alone and investigates a spooky barn lying in ruins. The Yeti is glimpsed through the crudely spaced planks of wood while stalking Tom from the roof, the ominous heartbeat combining with some disorienting camera angles to create a trippy atmosphere that will either annoy or thrill you. What can I say, I'm usually thrilled by these things.

I ask you, is this not the best title in the entire history of cinema?

Thursday, January 22, 2015

If horror movies sometimes reflect whatever we're paranoid about as a society at any given moment, the horror films of the 70s revealed that, along with the idea of getting possessed or attacked by a large fish with sharp teeth, we became fixated on the idea that someone somewhere would like to eat us. With "Night of the Living Dead", it was zombies that wanted to tear us apart and eat us, but could this really be considered cannibalism? Later films like "Cannibal Holocaust" gave us a heaping dose of xenophobia with our yum yums, with various people venturing into the wild jungle only to be tortured and eaten by the savage natives. A mindless corpse wanting to eat us is one thing, and you've got to expect cannibal tribes to come for you if you travel their hunting grounds, but there's something especially disturbing about cannibal tendencies hiding in plain sight. A distinct kind of cannibal film template started forming in the early 70s that treated the eating of human flesh in a disturbing, matter-of-fact way. If you haven't seen this genre's greatest offering, 1974's "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre", what the hell are you waiting for? There isn't much that can match that film's ferocious intensity and bleak depiction of victims dehumanized and treated as meat, but its theme of cannibals luring victims onto their dinner plates exists in a number of early films that came both before and after 1974 (and before 1977's widely-seen "The Hills Have Eyes"). Herein lies a collection of cannibalism flicks that are a little farther off the beaten path, in no particular order.

Featured on Groovy Doom just a short while ago, this movie really took me by surprise. A low-low budget effort that nevertheless attains that elusive atmosphere that a horror movie aspires to, "Warlock Moon" tells the tale of a young female college student who finds herself fascinated by a mysterious abandoned resort that her new boyfriend brings her to for some exploring. After discovering a friendly but strange old woman seemingly living alone there, the girl slowly begins to realize that she's been selected to be served as a hearty meal for a cult of devil-worshipping cannibals. Piecing together some local folklore, she learns the cult is eager to recreate their perfect sacrifice, which was when they served a young bride's body to a horde of unsuspecting, hungry guests attending a banquet in her honor.

This movie strikes a unique chord by linking Satanism and cannibalism, bringing the iconic representation of a flesh-eating witch from a fairy tale into a modern environment where even a young college student could be menaced, and although the budget is very low, it's one of those worthwhile tradeoffs where the lack of money brings out great creativity in the filmmakers. There are also a number of well done scenes between the two leads, Laurie Walters and Joe Spano.

6. The Ghoul (1975)Also known as: "Night Of The Ghoul"

Released in 1975 and helmed by veteran director Freddie Francis, "The Ghoul" is not one of the more celebrated British horror films of its era. This could be due to its lethargic pace and obscure premise. What it does have going for it is Peter Cushing, who plays a disgraced former priest living a secluded lifestyle in a mansion on the moors, seemingly with only a few servants. When a group of posh revelers take part in a drunken racing challenge, one car breaks down by Cushing's manse, its two occupants turned into victims. The young man is disposed of, while the lovely young woman winds up on the menu for the mansion's secret resident: Cushing's demented son, who apparently picked up a taste for human flesh while Cushing had his family in India with him doing missionary work. Although it's extremely slow moving, what we're really seeing is a British take on the then-burgeoning horror trope involving isolated cannibalistic clans. The weird cook in this film is an Indian woman who lives with the family and presumably prepares The Ghoul's unusual menu, which is a far out concept when you think about it. What a niche market cannibalistic chefs must commandeer.

"The Ghoul" is worthwhile more for what it doesn't show than for what it does, and you can believe me when I say it doesn't show a lot. It lacks the gore and sex that was in demand by 1975, and features some laughable not-so-special effects when The Ghoul finally stumbles out into the open at the end. He's revealed to be an ordinary looking guy with a shaved bald head and...a green lens filter over his face. Oh yeah, and he also has a traveling blurry spot that goes with him when he moves, although what they were trying to give the impression of with that I will never know. But "The Ghoul" has a fantastic feel to it thanks to the foreboding settings. The mansion itself is really interesting, with stratospheric staircases and intricate woodwork. John Hurt appears in a role that could best be described as a parallel to "Texas Chain Saw"s bizarre Hitch-hiker character (and to think, just a few years later he gave birth to an alien). Of course Peter Cushing is as compelling as always here, especially the moment in the script when he weeps over a portrait of his departed wife. In reality, Cushing's wife had recently passed away, and it is her picture in the frame.

What would you do if you were a lonely college student and a Nigerian prince sent you an e-mail that said he needed your bank account to deposit a few million dollars? Well if you were Regina McKee, you would probably agree, because in this movie she falls for an even more outlandish scam: a letter she receives just in time for spring break announces that she's won an all-expenses paid vacation to a seaside resort, and when she calls the phone number they give her, she's told a private plane is coming to pick her up that very day. What she doesn't realize is she's on a collision course with cannibalism, a potential victim of a lovely old couple who lure girls to their mansion, where they are pampered and overfed before being slaughtered and served for dinner the next night (only the hosts, of course, know what the meat really is). Regina breaks the cycle when she and the old couple's bizarre young "grandson" Baby John take a liking to one another, but will it be enough to keep her from becoming pot roast?

"Folks At Red Wolf Inn" features an off kilter atmosphere that is rather unique. The horror elements aren't overstated, with very little onscreen violence and only the tamest of gory content. Instead director Bud Townsend emphasizes the oddball personalities of both the cannibals and their guests, with a memorable cast of interesting character actors. This movie got under my skin because even though it doesn't have the brutality of "Texas Chain Saw Massacre", the horrifying aspects came from unexpected places. It is a very early treatment of cannibalism as a matter-of-fact plot element, presenting characters who slaughter human victims like animals and eat them for food, yet still have to interact with them socially in order to maintain their food supply. The film's cynical twist is that it has shown us how Regina dodges her fate and has come to accept this lifestyle of cannibalism and murder as a trade off for finding love. It also contains one of the most unsettling dinner scenes ever committed to film, as a small dinner party takes part in an orgiastic feast on what we suspect to be human ribs, with half of the guests unaware that they're stuffing their faces with the remains of a human body.

The performers are all appealingly quirky as well. Veteran character actors Mary Jackson and Arthur Space are quietly menacing as the old cannibal couple, Jackson later becoming well known to a generation of TV viewers as a recurring character on "The Waltons". Margaret Avery who later appeared in Spielberg's "The Color Purple" appears here as a Red Wolf Inn main course named Edwina. Lead actress Linda Gillen is charming as the naive Regina, who is first lured to the estate as a meal but is ultimately seduced into the cannibal lifestyle by John Neilson, whose performance is weird and startling. Neilson's character is quiet throughout most of the film, suddenly lurching into terrifying violent outbursts, such as the moment that fans of the film have come to know as "the shark scene". Just watch.

Young drifter Meg Foster finds her early-70s mellow seriously harshed by a guy who keeps his freezer well stocked with the human victims that he lures to the house he shares with his sister. When he invites Meg to stay, she stumbles upon his meat-eating secret and escapes. Returning to the house with a sympathetic young man she meets when she's hospitalized, she manages to convince everyone that she isn't tripping after all.

"Yeah man, it was like, you know, really bad like the brown acid at Woodstock, man...."

Although not as violent as the film's ads would have you believe, "Welcome To Arrow Beach" does have some blood and one gross-out shock, a brief but satisfying moment when the freezer and its bloody contents are revealed. It's worth noting that when the film was re-released in the 80s as "Tender Flesh", the film's poster boldly proclaimed that this scene would be the most terrifying sight of your life, so it's a good thing they at least tried to make this moment scary. What makes "Welcome To Arrow Beach" so memorable though isn't really its horror, but its heavy 70s vibe. This film is also notable for featuring a number of well-known actors, including Foster, Laurence Harvey (his final film), and Joanna Pettet.

The cleaning staff is gonna be pissed when they see this.

3. Raw Meat (1973)Also known as: "Death Line"

A somewhat more obscure British production that has found a greater audience on home video after a DVD re-release in 2003, "Death Line" was the original title before it played American theaters as "Raw Meat", a delightfully lurid title change that emphasizes the cannibalism aspect of the story. A series of disappearances in a particular station of the London Underground turns out to be the work of a demented tunnel dweller, a descendant of a group of workers who were hopelessly trapped in a turn-of-the-century tunnel collapse and presumed dead. Instead the group survived and continued on by eating their own dead. When his mate dies, this last living descendant starts to venture out into the underground to search for human victims to bring back to his lair for food.

David Ladd and Sharon Gurney are featured as a young London couple caught up in the murder investigation, Donald Pleasance sports a heavy accent as the Inspector in charge of the case, and Christopher Lee makes a cameo appearance as well. The movie isn't nearly as violent or gory as the trailer wants you to believe, but the premise is pretty nightmarish and there are a few strong moments, including a slow pan around the cannibal's lair revealing bodies in various states of decomposition and consumption. Although the cannibalism is implied rather than shown graphically on screen, the cinematography is pretty creepy, and the look of the movie is appropriately morbid and gloomy.

2. Cannibal Girls (1973)

Hailing from the same era as most of the other films on this list, "Cannibal Girls" is a Canadian twist on the people-eatin' theme, directed by Ivan "Ghostbusters" Reitman. Although "Cannibal Girls" could also be considered a low budget blend of comedy and horror, don't expect anything along the lines of "Ghostbusters". "Cannibal Girls" is set against the backdrop of the wintry Canadian countryside, with Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin (YES!) as a road tripping couple who stumble upon the legend of three ghostly cannibal girls in a quaint rural village. These supposed cannibal girls lived in a home that's now (supposedly) been turned into a (supposed) restaurant, so naturally our curious couple wants to visit, where they find out that some legends (and recipes) are just too good to not be true. Although there isn't much actual gore in "Cannibal Girls", the producers felt the need to include a William Castle type gimmick where an alarm sounds just before anything (supposedly) violent is about to happen, just in case you want to look away. Selling the movie with the promise of violence isn't the same thing as actually showing violence, and "Cannibal Girls" is about as tame as it can get. But it's oh-so-70s, and I am a total sucker for that.

A young woman travels to a small seaside town searching for her father, who has stopped communicating with her under mysterious circumstances. She finds that the town has been infected by the return of an occult figure known as the Messiah of Evil, who inspires the local townspeople to take up cannibalism. They also may or may not be dead.

I wanted to leave zombie films off this list, but this one is a must because zombie lists don't really want "Messiah of Evil", either. There aren't any real zombies in it, since the pasty-faced 'dead people' in the film aren't always visibly zombified, and they are able to walk, talk and run. Zombies don't run, do they?

"I told you before, I'm not a zombie, zombies aren't blue. Well, not THIS shade of blue, anyway."

"Messiah of Evil" earns its modest creep factor by depicting its villains as ordinary-looking people who have all been 'infected' by a conspiracy to attack people and consume their flesh. Although we never really see much of the Messiah of Evil, he's depicted holding 'sermons' where he seems to convert people to cannibalism as some sort of religious experience. The movie is an atmospheric slow burn punctuated by a few attack scenes that are low on gore but staged extremely well, particularly one where a female victim finds herself trapped in a supermarket and realizes she's about to become the daily special.

As far as the cast goes, the cult movie cred in "Messiah of Evil" is through the goddamn roof. Marianna Hill is the lead actress, she of such classick films as "The Baby", "Thumb Tripping", and "Blood Beach". Anitra Ford makes one of her precious few genre film appearances as well, and while her role isn't as juicy as it is in "Invasion of the Bee Girls", it's still a pleasure to watch her. Also on hand is Michael Greer, who appeared in films such as the fantastic "The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart" and "The Gay Deceivers". Joy Bang also features in this, doing one of her best characterizations as one of Michael Greer's two female traveling companions. She also has one of the film's best scenes, where she's attacked in a movie theater by an ever-increasing horde of cannibals who come into the theater and slowly gather behind her, like the crows gathering on Hitchcock's playground.

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It's probably inevitable that several of the films in this genre, as well as a few listed here, share very similar elements, but some of the plots are so alike that you wonder who had the first idea. "Folks at Red Wolf Inn", "Welcome To Arrow Beach" and "Warlock Moon" all feature older cannibals luring potential young female victims to their intended doom, as well as an important "what's in the freezer?" moment where the protagonist discovers the truth about the mystery meat she's been eating. Curiously, "Cannibal Girls" has an unexpected connection to "Folks At Red Wolf Inn" as well, due to its silly William Castle style gimmick of a "horror horn" going off before the supposedly gory moments; and in "Red Wolf Inn", when Regina opens the freezer to find decapitated heads, we hear the same oogah car horn sound. There's also some major crossover between "Cannibal Girls" and "Warlock Moon", as both of them feature a local legend mixing ghosts and cannibalism. Coincidence, or were they all copying each others recipes? Only the chefs know for sure.